The Last Guardian – The First Story

I have a feeling. It’s just an idea born from trying to understand how the latest game from Team ICO could possibly continue the legend of the boy with horns. While watching the announcement trailer I’m aware that Trico (the beast) has horns and while this is not unusual one has to assume that nothing is there without purpose or meaning (except the tortoise in SotC) and that these horns may provide an important clue as to the story behind all three games.

In Ico, the boy with horns is imprisoned within the castle for reasons of superstitious speculation. “For the good of the village” is the only reason garnered from the anonymous figures that guard Ico’s freedom. The boy without horns in The Last Guardian appears to befriend a beast with horns and it’s certain that the due embark on many wonderful adventures as they progress through the game.

The origins of Ico’s horns have been widely accepted as the direct result of Wanders fate in SotC. The horns on Trico are not at all similar and appear to be the horns of a juvenile creature as they are underdeveloped, one even appears to have been cut or blunted. But what if these horns were hiding a dark secret? What if the beast within was Dormin and that The Last Guardian tells the tale of his imprisonment unto the Forbidden Land found in SotC.

There are a lot of questions and, while The Last Guardian may provide some answers I’m sure that we will all be left a little bemused as the plot develops and more questions arise. To be perfectly honest I don’t care, not enough to spoil my enjoyment, because the act of playing Team ICO’s games is such a natural and wonderful experience that any pondering on the fate of the plot or the motivations of ‘the village’ are inconsequential.

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Relationships with a Pixel

Team ICO’s games are enjoyable because they capture a feeling for the player that is seldom explored in games. If you’ve ever played a modern videogame then chances are you will have had a relationship with your on-screen avatar whether it be to shout at them for not doing what you want, to feeling a little sad when they are killed to even feeling fear for them when threatened.

Team ICO tends to exploit this feeling by showing the player this relationship on screen between two characters. By doing this the player can’t help but feel in some way connected to the characters, like a surrogate parent nurturing the on-screen relationship and protecting it. In Ico for instance, the relationship between Ico and Yorda is so innocent and childlike that one can’t help feel for them both and every effort is made by the player to protect them both.

I have played other games where this doesn’t happen. Tomb raider for instance; my time with Lara Croft was quite a dominant relationship to the point where I would find interesting and gruesome ways for her to be killed. I think this happens because I don’t feel protective of the avatar and indeed she is there to obey me. In Ico, Yorda and Ico are relying on each other for protection and look to me for guidance therefore I immediately feel a different kind of connection other than to dominate.

It’s this dynamic which is at the centre of Team ICO’s games and one which I look forward to exploring with each new release. From what I know of The Last Guardian, this dynamic is again exploited in the relationship between the young boy and the creature, Trico.

There are examples of this in other games within the industry. Games of note are ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ for the PS2 and the Gamecube, the relationship between Jade and Pey'j. You may also want to look at the recent ‘Prince of Persia’ game and the relationship between the Prince and the Princess, although this is less successful due in part to the lack of substance the game presents. Team ICO seems to understand this dynamic more than any other game developer and this is one of the reasons their games tend to feel much more human than the crowd.

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Fumito Ueda Discusses The Last Guardian

Published in Famitsu Magazine on 6th March 2009, an interview with director Fumito Ueda(Director/Lead Designer) that blows the door open on both the trailer and everything else that he and his team are aiming for with their first publicly-announced project in four years.

The trailer's focus is naturally on Trico, the "great man-eating eagle" of the game's Japanese-language title and a creature with a bit of bird, cat, dog, and everything else you can think of in him. Did the game's core concept begin with this guy's design? "We thought we could take the relationship you built with Agro as you went through Shadow of the Colossus and make that more of the main focus of the game design," Ueda said. "Also, both the PlayStation 3 and Japan-made video games in general haven't exhibited a lot of energy lately, so we chose a theme for our game that instead offered a very strong presence."

Discussing Trico's design, Ueda revealed that his team's primary focus was to create a virtual creature that was interesting to interact with while being as realistic as possible. "Replicating a real-life dog or cat is not impossible, but if you have a dog or cat in real life, you're always going to notice the unnatural idiosyncrasies of the virtual animal first," he said. "The current design is a product of thinking about what works with the game's design while looking as natural as possible. It's a mixture of features from many animals, and even I think it's a pretty strange combination. That's what we were aiming for, though. We kept it deliberately unbalanced because looking strange was important here.

"There are lots of games that have cute-looking characters, but that 'cute' is mostly a symbolic 'cute,' taking real life and deforming it. The traits of a real animal are much more complex, but I think video games, and in particular the power of the PS3, have the power to express them. The challenge for us is to show truly animal-like expressions -- the way the eyes move and open, or the way it moves or raises its hackles."

In The Last Guardian, the player controls the boy seen in the trailer, interacting with the eagle as he explores the game world. Exactly how the boy and eagle meet up is still a secret, but one scene in the trailer seems to show the boy giving the eagle some food. "You can feed the eagle, as well as take out any spears or harpoons stuck in his body," Ueda said. "You're free to interact with him at any time, but having to care for him constantly would be annoying, so we're striking a balance. Building your characters and solving puzzles are important parts of any game, but an animal strikes a presence in your life simply by looking at it. There is an air of mystery to them, since you can't be sure what thoughts could be crossing their mind, and that's another reason why animals are a main theme of the game."

Interacting with your griffin-ish friend is not going to be smooth going from start to finish, however. "The eagle does not simply follow all of your directions," Ueda said. "Throwing something that catches his interest will get him to move -- you aren't working with him and giving him orders, but you're more taking advantage of his natural behavior. Sometimes, you'll need him to sit still in order to finish a section, but he'll run off on you instead. He's not all that smart, and he won't necessarily do what the player wants all the time."

As Ueda put it to Famitsu, the classic Ico/Colossus gameplay -- climbing up, grabbing on to things, figuring out how to get from point A to point B -- will be the main thrust of The Last Guardian as well. "This game, unlike the previous ones, runs on a full physics engine, but it's not just for the purposes of technology," he noted. "I think it's important that any piece of technology you use contributes to the themes you're trying to express. We're very serious about this -- for example, in the scene [in the trailer] where the eagle grabs the barrel and swallows it, that's not simple animation; the barrel makes interactive contact with his mouth, and physical momentum drives it down his throat. We learned a great deal about AI processing in Ico and transformative collisions in Shadow of the Colossus; here, we've put the two together and brought them up to PlayStation 3 level, and that lets us make this world the kind of inviting, 'I wish I could go there' place that Ico and Colossus had."

Sony Computer Entertainment announced at E3 that The Last Guardian is a 2010 release, and Ueda declined to go into further specifics, other than to say "there is definitely a reason why we are announcing this when we are." Online compatibility is still up in the air -- "There are things I'd like to do with the online environment," Ueda said, but "I can't definitely say whether it will happen."

Article taken from 1up.com. Written by Kevin Gifford.

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